Girl in a Band (7 page)

MICHAEL BYRON,
an aspiring musician I had dated before Danny, lived close to school, and during senior year my friends and I would sneak out and climb over the tall wire fencing to get to his house, where we would get stoned, listen to Miles Davis's
Bitches Brew,
and make out. I had another good friend, Willie Winant, whose older brother later created the TV show
My So-Called Life,
which was coincidentally filmed at my high school. Willie was a drummer, and none of the other girls in our class wanted much to do with him—he was bighearted but not especially attuned to his body. I used to choreograph dance pieces in our free-form modern dance class, with Willie always at the center
of the piece. To me it was a challenge to show the other girls, and my teacher, who knew nothing about dance, that body type didn't matter.

Outside of school I took classes at a Martha Graham studio from an eccentric French woman, but my mother didn't want me to pursue dance—it was too showbiz for her. The dance teacher at my high school also taught gym, and to me those classes were the only truly creative classes I had. What was the most outrageous thing you could do and still call it a “dance” while not getting kicked out of school? I remember choreographing one performance to Frank Zappa's song “Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague” from the album
Uncle Meat
. Willie mimed going to the bathroom, while my fellow dancers and I were the toilet mechanisms, tossing toilet paper out into the audience. A year later, Matthew Bright, who went on to direct the infamous Reese Witherspoon film
Freeway,
bragged that during his own dance performance he'd tossed chicken livers out into the audience.

My best friend at the time was a girl named Marge. Marge and I would sneak out at night and meet each other halfway between our two houses. One night, a few of us stole some big ice blocks out of the school ice machine and snuck onto the Bel Air golf course at two
A.M.
We laid towels over the ice and slid down the dark slopes. Another time we drove to Beverly Hills and swiped flowers from people's front lawns. It was a harmless thrill, we reasoned, because after all, Beverly Hills was too perfect in the first place.

Marge also liked to drag me to peace demonstrations and love-ins. As the oldest of three kids, and a take-charge person, she was far tougher and more grown-up than I was. On the surreal, shocking night Bobby Kennedy was shot, Marge had gone to the Ambassador Hotel to see him speak. One moment she was talking about going over there, and two hours later RFK was dead—in L.A., too, that safe and beautiful place of movie-lot landscaping, shiny new cars, and tanned good-looking people, a city where thanks to the curfew laws no one was allowed to so much as loiter.

I graduated high school as a midterm grad. I was glad it was over, and as a “young” high school grad who had just turned seventeen, I decided
to take a year off before starting Santa Monica College. My parents wouldn't pay for me to go to CalArts, but I was bullheaded and had no interest in going anyplace else. Eventually I got bored waitressing and doing other menial jobs, and I moved in with a friend, Kathy Walters, a Santa Monica College student. If memory serves, the tuition at Santa Monica College was $30 a semester. Of course this was before Ronald Reagan wrecked the entire California school system, from the community colleges up to the state university level, with his brilliant ideas about freezing property taxes, thereby leaving no money for education. Next he would go after the whole country.

The fall after high school, I was going out with a quiet, introverted, gentle guy named Rick, who was in his early twenties. Rick lived in Westwood Village, which during the early seventies was the only place that had any kind of a scene, a hive for creativity. Rick introduced me to another resident of Westwood Village, his friend Larry Gagosian.

Larry was hanging out in Westwood, dealing art books in the street. Entrepreneurs always exhibit signs early on of who they'll become, I guess. Larry had rented an outdoor space, which he subleased to other vendors, in order to create a sort of mini-plaza. There he sold schlocky, mass-produced prints of works by contemporary artists—the kind that appeal to teenage girls or women in their twenties who think of themselves as dreamy romantics—in cheap, ugly metal frames. Marge and I were looking to make money—I was trying to be as financially independent as possible, having watched Keller rely on my parents for years, and being unemployed, and stressing them out, which I didn't want to add to—so we started working for him.

Frame after frame—I must have assembled thousands of those things, and the dimensions twenty-four by thirty-six inches are still carved in my brain. It would have been straight-ahead, decent grunt work if Larry had been a good boss, but he wasn't. He was mean, yelling at us all the time for messing up, being too slow, just plain
being
. He was erratic, and the last person on the planet I would have ever thought would later become the world's most powerful art dealer. Larry had a
bull terrier named Muffin that he was always trying to get rid of, and he once told me that whenever a woman slept over at his place, Muffin would get jealous, and go under the bed and tear up the woman's clothes with her fangs.

Eventually I quit working for Larry—I just couldn't take it any longer—but our paths would keep mixing up again and again.

SOMETIMES I THINK
we know on some level the person we're going to be in our life, that if we pay attention, we can piece out that information. I find it strange when people
don't
know what they want to do in life. Because even when I was a young kid pushing around clay objects at the UCLA Lab School, I knew I wanted to be an artist. Nothing else mattered. I cringe when I recall Andrea Fraser, the performance artist and one of the most fearless artists I know, using that line in one of her performances to critique art institutions and artist myths: “The exact words are, ‘I wanted to be an artist since I was five.'” Because that was my line.

My mother always thought I'd become a graphic artist someday, even though I never showed any interest in graphic design (I was a painter/sculptor—all sloppy work, no graphics in sight). Then again she sometimes also told her friends that I'd end up as an interpreter for the United Nations—“She's so good with people,” she would tell them, though it still confuses me why she'd say something like that about someone so obviously shy and uncommunicative. Eventually both my parents, especially my dad, supported the idea of my pursuing a creative life. Keller's breakdown might have eroded their expectations, setting the bar that much lower:
Kim can do anything she wants as long as she doesn't go crazy.

I remember a friend's older brother interrogating me when I was a teenager:
An artist? How are you going to be an artist? What are you going to do if you don't make it as an artist? What if you fail? Do you have a backup plan?
It never occurred to me I would fail. “Your art is very personal,” Danny said to me once. “So it'll be popular.”
Personal
is something I still equate with Sunday painters. I still carry around with me a battle between working conceptually—art based on some overriding idea—and my pure carnal sensory love of materials.

In 1972, I started attending Santa Monica College. By this point, Rick, my then boyfriend, had started suffering from seizures. At eighteen I felt too young to be living with the constant fear of someone having a seizure and me sitting there helplessly, not knowing what to do. That, and my leaving for college, contributed to our breakup.

I became involved, again, with Danny and I moved to Venice with a couple of friends. Postmodern architecture was the thing then, and parts of Venice were all funky wood construction, with oddball angles and unexpected windows of wood and corrugated sheet metal intertwined alongside the little indigenous cottages intended for weekend use by Hollywood actors and drifters. In the midseventies Venice was also a rough, scary place. One street would be fine but a block away was a potential drug war zone. I lived on one of the rotten streets. On the day we were unpacking stuff from my '68 VW Bug, a deranged-looking
guy approached us holding a long butcher knife. His movements were so slow and balletic he could only have been high, and we circled around him before tearing into the house and locking the door. Another night when I wasn't home, someone drove down the street firing gunshots into all the houses on our side of the street.

Guillermo, my landlord, was an Argentinian who was also a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He lived next door, which meant there was always a party atmosphere. At the time I was friends with a guy named Richie O'Connell and Richie's good friend Bruce Berry, who was somehow related to Jan Berry of the sixties rock duo Jan and Dean. Whenever Guillermo and Bruce came home from touring, a bunch of us would go carousing until dawn. One night, we went to Jan's house high in the hills, a cheesy contemporary glass box on a tacky hilltop in a would-be neighborhood, surrounded by nothing. Cocaine was prevalent, heroin more under-the-table, but I wasn't into that stuff. I do remember being there one morning at around eight
A.M.
watching a topless girl float through the living room playing a violin.

Later Bruce started working just for David Crosby. When he told everybody he knew that someone had jacked David's car and stolen his Stratocaster, we all knew it was Bruce and that he had sold David's guitar to get heroin. In the early nineties, when Sonic Youth went on tour with Neil Young, I realized that Neil's song “Tonight's the Night,” about a roadie who had overdosed, was written for that same Bruce Berry. He had died in 1973.

That would all come later. When I lived in Venice, Richard, Bruce, and I would stay up all night driving around the Hollywood Hills, dropping in at the houses of unlikely people, like Hal Blaine, the famous studio drummer who'd worked with Elvis, the Beach Boys, and Steely Dan. Another night a bunch of friends and I went up to Arthur Janov's house. Janov was the creator of the primal scream, a therapy technique that was supposed to return you to your birth trauma experience and release you by encouraging screaming and other vocal disinhibitions. The Janovs lived in one of those houses way up high on Mulholland
Drive. The place wasn't as creepy as the famous
Body Double
house but it was close—a coldly beautiful, empty, modern house with a huge wraparound-window view of downtown L.A. I didn't know their daughter, Ellen, well; she was a friend of a friend. She was deeply troubled, and also a junkie, though I wasn't aware of that at the time. Rumor had it she hung out with the Rolling Stones, who were friends of her parents. As the night went on, all my friends vanished into one or another of the cold rooms, and I remember waiting there by myself until the next morning, until they were all ready to leave. A few months later, Ellen died in a house fire.

It is said that Joni Mitchell's guitar playing on
Song to a Seagull
made Jimmy Page cry. I wonder if like so many of those English musicians who grew up in the fog and the bleakness, Jimmy Page was in love with California and the idea of the canyons, if not the canyons themselves. Even if I had to leave L.A. to become myself, I loved the mystique of the canyons, too, and all they represented. By the mid-1970s the California aesthetic was definitely being exported, and I would have to take it with me.

AFTER TWO YEARS
at Santa Monica College, I transferred to York University in Toronto. Willie Winant, my friend from high school and dance class, was planning to study percussion there and told me about the place. York had an interdisciplinary program, and I fantasized I could study dance there as well as visual art. Money was a big factor, too. I learned that Canadian colleges cost next to nothing, so that made York much more appealing, as I was still trying to rely as little as possible on my parents, even though they footed the bill.

We drove together in tandem, me following Willie cross-country in my VW Bug. When we got to Saint Louis, suddenly the world turned
brown. The landscape became ugly, hard to face, the buildings miniature and lopped off, like pieces in some sad board game. I wasn't used to brown, or shadows even—Southern California light transformed even the scraggly parts and ruined colors of the city into toothy, opal grays—and I began to feel that I'd made a giant mistake leaving California.

Toronto was starkly different from Los Angeles too—a shiny, gleaming downtown area, mixed with row-house architecture that felt ordinary and cheerless. I moved into a big good-looking Victorian house with the sister of a high school friend and two of her friends, all of them younger, all of them dancers. You'd think it would have been a match, but they were all freshmen, and hard to relate to, and I didn't like being in a roommate situation where I was obliged to contribute money to the collective food budget or take my turn going to the supermarket, especially if I wasn't planning on being there most of the time. Neither was the York arts program as interdisciplinary as I thought it would be, which meant I was pretty much on my own, doing art in a small room. Willie and I soon became friends with the other American grad students at York, as well as with two Chilean boys who were cousins. It wasn't until recently when I reconnected with one of them that I realized the boys were at some point members of a seventies Chilean cult prog-rock band called the Blops, who'd emigrated to the U.S. to escape Chile's dictatorship.

My media class at York was taught by the Fluxus filmmaker George Manupelli. George was by far the most interesting teacher in the college, a heavy drinker with a much younger girlfriend who was a former student. Fluxus explored art as a process, using the viewer, or the audience, to complete the work. It asked,
What can art be?

For a project, a group of my friends and I decided to start a band. We called it Below the Belt, and the lineup was me, a Canadian girl named Rae, Willie on regular drums (though he was a percussionist, Willie wasn't used to a conventional drum set and would just end a song when he got tired), and the two Chilean boys, Felipe on guitar and Juan Pablo on bass. Rae, a raven-haired beauty, and I sang and played tambourine. In their tight, satin green trousers, the two Chilean boys were much
more Rolling Stones–like in their appearance and approach than the rest of us, who were far more casual about the whole thing.

Our second gig was at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Before the show, we all got drunk. That night Willie wore a dress and a hat, and before the show started, he blew fire across the stage, a style and a trick he'd developed during his short stint with the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo with Danny Elfman. Willie liked shocking people, and he summoned us onstage by asking “the spics and cunts to come on out and play.” We were, I remember, an explosive mess, pure mayhem and caterwauling. We danced, tossed our tambourines onto the ground, and let everything fall apart into a garage noise jam. It didn't take management long to pull the plug. We played only two or three times, mostly for fun, but I knew this band wasn't going anywhere. Years later, my lifelong friend, the artist Mike Kelley—who always derived immense pleasure from the unacceptable—told me he was in the audience that night, and that our performance had inspired him to go home and start a “noise garage band.” In retrospect, I realize that the band Mike started became Destroy All Monsters and grew to include ex-members of the Stooges. Until Mike told me this, I had no idea what genre Below the Belt even was, if any. But I did know one thing: I liked performing.

York University had just rolled out a brand-new music department—there were always small concerts going on, including performances of works by the resident composers. I saw lots of great contemporary music while I was there, from the Art Ensemble of Chicago to the premiere of John Cage and David Tudor's bicentennial
Rainforest
piece, though mostly I was bored, making minimalist, gooey, unstretched paintings, with no instructor. Rather than write a paper for my film class, I decided to make a silent surrealist film about Patty Hearst, who'd just been let go by the Symbionese Liberation Army. With her shoulder-length black hair, my fellow bandmate Rae made a picture-perfect Patty. Felipe, who was also a filmmaker, shot and helped me edit the movie. George Manupelli lent me a sixteen-millimeter camera and film. I was immersed in art, but unformed and trying anything and everything.

But I was homesick, too, less and less happy as the bleak Toronto winter moved in. Without the benefit of California sunshine, my hair grew darker and darker, and I had no idea how to dress for the cold. When the school year ended, I drove home to California, and instead of making plans to return to York, I began attending Otis Art Institute in downtown L.A. At $600 a semester, Otis was undistinguished but cheap. I lived here and there: Culver City, Silver Lake, Venice again. To pay my bills, I found work in a little Indian restaurant called Dhaba, which served home-cooked, endlessly simmered Indian food. My parents weren't all that happy—they wanted me to finish what I'd started at York—but Otis changed my life.

For one thing, I became very close to John Knight, a conceptual artist with an architectural background who'd come to Otis as an artist in residence and taught a seminar. I was twenty-four, he was thirty-one. John was captivating, the first real mentor I'd ever had. I'd never met anyone like him, and the landscape of L.A. was our playground for any kind of mutual intellectual discussion. John was born and raised in L.A., and his art practice centered on whatever political and social forces were inherent in the design, architecture, history, and function of the visible world, while simultaneously taking in a viewer's relation to the art or the spectacle in question. His career has recently become more visible and influential.

Then, though, he was an intellectual light, and a minor renegade, having been kicked out of Otis in his day for cutting the school's hedges as part of a sculpture. He and I spent hours driving around L.A., looking at assorted local oddities and suburban inventions, drive-throughs and outlying tract-house developments with their small deadening model homes. He showed me neighborhoods on the Eastside I'd never seen before. As usual, everywhere and everything in L.A. was either a blunt, bizarre juxtaposition—an old quaint one-story ranch house squeezed in beside a mammoth McMansion—or a potential picnic destination, whether it was the Huntington gardens or a green grass patch fronting
some new development. No matter where I go in my life, visually L.A. will always be my favorite place on earth.

John Knight taught me that anything—a car, a house, a lawn—could be seen and talked about in aesthetic terms. He introduced me to conceptual art, showed me how all art derives from an idea. Every week, his class met at a different place, typically one of his students' houses or apartments. We would discuss in detail whatever came up or whatever happened to be around—what kind of font a typewriter used, for example. Was it Helvetica, or Futura, or a less predictable, flouncier typeface? This may sound trivial, but it taught us that detail mattered—in John's own work, as in most conceptual art, detail practically
becomes
the work—but big things mattered too. It was John, after all, who told me I had enough credits to petition my way out of Otis, which turned out to be surprisingly easy to do. But before that happened, Dan Graham came along.